Indentations
here's a short story i slapped together today
It is not uncommon for a passenger to lose a belonging on a plane. Some things, of course, are more important than others: a wallet outranks a toy. Some are doomed to be lost: the sense of camaraderie developed via weathering severe turbulence inevitably gives way to the battle royale of disembarking. And some carry value not so much in themselves but in what they potentially represent. As an example: in 2002, a girl with bite marks on her arms once forgot she had stored an unmarked paper bag beneath her seat that she – and only she – knew contained a stack of trading cards. The airline worker who discovered it thirty minutes later imagined it contained something less benign.
Yes, shaking up two hundred or so pressurized people for several hours will result in much haste and clamor as they spray forth into their destination gate, and in that haste and clamor, things are lost. The girl will not remember the paper bag until weeks afterward, buried as it is under the pile of things abandoned in her sudden departure from home. When she remembers, she will not cry; in the span between loss and remembrance, the transition between Californian childhood and Texan adolescence, life will have already wrung her tear ducts dry.
Right now, however, she is not crying. Instead she is trying not to pee as she jogs to keep up with an airport staffer who with adult strides guides her from one gate to another to reach a connecting flight in time. In her hand, the hand of her younger Swiss cousin, who in turn is linked to a younger younger Swiss cousin. Cheryl does not know either of them at all, but she likes them because they laugh and talk about what they see and she likes their streaky honey and brown hair, about which she is only mildly jealous.
They reach their gate out of breath but with minutes to spare before boarding commences; the guide mentions to the clerk working the gate counter that these three girls are traveling alone. While this occurs, Cheryl's cousin releases her hand. Cheryl feels her chest sink but does not understand why. She does not realize that it had been a long long time since she last held someone's hand. She does not realize she missed it deeply. She gnaws at her index finger while she half-listens to her cousins discuss an odd-looking man.
Before Cheryl can remember to use the bathroom, yet another uniformed adult arrives to usher her and her two Swiss cousins down a vertigo-inducing jet bridge and onto a loud plane. She closes her eyes as she steps across the gap separating bridge and plane, afraid the strange winds seeping through it will somehow suck her onto the ground. No such thing happens. But it unnerves her, and she pushes past the helpful crewmate, sprints to the lavatory, and slams the door shut.
As Cheryl urinates above the Denver tarmac with her forearm in her mouth she thinks about where she is going, and to whom, and why, and what she has left behind, and about how little she knows of any of it.
When you move to a new home you end up needing to learn all manner of new things as the places and people and attitudes and practices and language mutate around you. You need to know not only who and what surrounds you but how to modulate your speech and behavior so as to integrate seamlessly with your new habitat. To fail to learn is to fail to adapt is to fail to survive. The first thing Cheryl learns is that if she bites herself gently enough to avoid leaving marks, her grandparents won't chide her for that. They may (and do) chide her for many natural behaviors: her lack of Sirs and Ma'ams, her inability to make a bed, her willingness to talk to strangers, but she can handle a great many rebukes so long as her mouth receives an uninterrupted supply of human flesh.
The second thing Cheryl learns is that Texas is hell-bent on cutting her off and she had better put a stop to her public mastication or she's going to end up in serious trouble. Her hands are dirty, she learns. She looks creepy, she learns. She's not a child anymore, she learns. But she also learns that her grandmother's fingers are covered in little pink and red marks where the outside layer of skin has been stripped away.
More than anything, she learns to use the bathroom a lot. One of the few measures of leeway afforded to the girl her mother shipped off to her grandparents instead of the boy they requested (who of course would have a much greater capacity for farm work and schoolwork and urine, and whose talent in ball sports would be more admirable) hinges entirely on the notion that girls have sensitive and tiny bladders and may need to drop what they're doing at any moment to go pee. In actuality, Cheryl's bladder has developed a great capacity for storing up piss, sensitive as it might be, and she can go a remarkable length of time without truly, truly needing to pee. This is a secret she never tells anyone because doing so would rob her of unlimited access to one of life's finest pleasures (and her only true oasis): the bathroom visit.
Really, Cheryl learns that the human body's seeming addiction to expelling liquids and solids is her lone lever of power around her grandparents, the bathroom her sole fulcrum. If the mid-morning sun scorches her skin between rows of tomatoes, if a plume of shoveled chicken shit irritates her eyes, if her brain is dulled by her grandfather's endless jabbering about Okinawa and Vietnam and Midland-Odessa, she develops the urge to pee. When Cheryl wants to annoy her loud grandparents or needs a break from them while on a road trip or out on errands, urine asserts itself inside her frequently. When they treat her to a few days without yelling, the need for relief diminishes, though she is careful to sustain the theatre.
When a mysterious third type of thing begins to seep out of her she almost goes mad with newfound power. Only a long-cultivated sense of prudence keeps her in check.
At one point her grandfather insists she start urinating behind buildings or trees so she does not have to run all the way back inside from the peach trees she's pruning or the pecans she's gathering. Admittedly, the image of pissing outside with the zephyrs and dogs and quivering trees appeals to her. When she tells her grandmother this, the old woman responds with a second image: her grandfather accidentally stumbling upon her with her pants down; she does not find this appealing. Her grandmother agrees and for once advocates for her granddaughter, and after a terse marital argument that buzzes with paranormal energy, shuts the idea down. This is how Cheryl learns that old Norma is quite aware she's married to a pedophile.
About six months pass before Cheryl's classmates stop calling her the "like, totally" kid. Instead she becomes Thornton, which is only a marginal improvement, if not a complete sidegrade. As it turns out, there is already a Cheryl at her school, whom everyone else already knows and has known for years, and despite the obvious fact that everyone likes the new Cheryl more than the old Cheryl, a respect for seniority drives most decision-making in this town and names are no exception. So New Cheryl gets relegated to her surname.
New Cheryl thinks this is like, totally unfair.
However, there is nothing to be done about it apart from waiting out the three years necessary for Old Cheryl to graduate, at which point the name Thornton will have etched itself deeply into everyone's tongue. When New Cheryl finds this out she will regret not having committed to her plan to arrange for Old Cheryl's mysterious disappearance. Frankly, letting the air out of someone's car's tires was unlikely to have resulted in any mysterious disappearance, but it might have had some sort of calming effect.
By way of consolation, Cheryl's friend Daniel lets her bite his arm before pre-algebra and history. This simple act signals to everyone else in school that they are dating, which is an idea that had never once occurred to either of them. He also calls her Cheryl, at least to her face. Behind her back, he has to call her Thornton or confusion will ensue among any classmates, teachers, or parents he talks to about her. Which he would not really have much reason to do if people would just stop asking him about all the rings of indentations on his arms. It's not that he finds the constant questioning annoying or tedious, he just doesn't know what to make of the strange mix of relief and concern people seem to express when they assume he's dating a girl named Thornton who treats him like a chew toy. But after his parents infer he has a girlfriend (and could prove by the shape of the marks on his arms that she was not a golden retriever), Daniel notices his dad stops giving him a hard time for quitting basketball and his mom no longer minds the stray B-minus. So he endures the biting and the incorrect assumptions about his romantic life and simply opts more frequently to wear long-sleeve shirts.
When the movie Bad Santa hits theaters next year, Daniel's friends will tease him about dating Billy Bob Thornton, and he will have to pretend he doesn't like the idea.
Regaining unfettered access to an arm she can bite firmly enough to occasionally wound has drastically improved Cheryl's mood around her grandparents, sure, but it has not altered her bathroom schedule. No one is particularly surprised when she butts into her grandparents' argument with a Kay Jewelers staffer over an unexpected and honestly quite absurd ring resizing fee to inform them that she's gotta go. These days, she just says "gotta go" and everyone knows where she's gotta go.
There is no mall so boring as one that contains your grandparents. Even the decaying husks of malls of the future, shambling along on their rotten, emptying department stores and their patchy food courts, will excite Cheryl in a way that her grandparents' endless visits to jewelry stores, yap sessions with Navy recruiters, and meanderings through mass-market "Western" attire joints never could. Because, no, she doesn't want to wear spurs or join the fucking Navy.
Cheryl stops to consider a Spencer's from the outside, determines she's probably got a half hour before anyone notices she hasn't returned, decides to pop inside and ogle the wall of lava lamps and touch the plasma plates and balls. One day, she will have a lava lamp in her room. This is her life's fondest wish and will remain so for about the next quarter hour, at which point a different dream will begin to coalesce inside her like a nebula disturbed. A simulated dog turd presents itself to her. Whoever makes this crap should be locked up, she thinks. Snakes lurk in an obviously false can of peanuts. Now that's a prank.
She buys nothing and walks out with a pair of cheap crescent-moon earrings in her back pocket. Just adjacent to the Spencer's is a bathroom hallway. Probably convenient for shoplifters. In the hallway, two women whisper to one another. Her sharp ears, well-practiced in the art of eavesdropping, do not manage to discern any words she understands. They are a lot of faded black jeans and hole-laden band shirts and metal studs protruding from garment and flesh, and she catches a whiff of cinnamon or charcoal as she passes them, conspicuously trying not to let on she's watching them. Quiet laughter taps her on the shoulder just before she enters the bathroom, and she almost turns around.
Cloistered within her favored architecture, the bathroom stall, Cheryl slips the earrings into her bra. The sharp edge of the card they're pinned through jabs her in what she can only charitably call a breast. She takes a piss because why not, and thinks it's pretty cool that someone scratched a pentagram into the door of the stall. Also present among the latrinalia: a cool S, letters in a heart that probably doesn't even represent love anymore, a dick (because in the new millennium everyone is empowered to draw a dick), some novel combination of rude words she will call her friend when she thinks their coach isn't listening. Coach is always listening. Maybe even in here.
Cheryl exits without washing the saliva off her hand, but she does examine it for marks before wiping it on her pants. As she looks up she notices that the hall women's whispered conversation has mutated into something a little different. They're not talking. It looks like one of them is in the process of mugging the other. She doesn't want to intervene, and as she takes a step closer with the intent of sneaking on by, she realizes there's no way she can pass without drawing attention to herself; they're blocking the hallway.
Upon closer inspection, she also realizes that what they're actually doing is making out, and now she super doesn't want to intervene. Her brain is unable to conjure up any further ideas, such as walking back into the bathroom or turning around and going out the fire exit, and really since no one is being mugged she has nothing to be afraid of aside of being caught gawking, and honestly it's their problem for making out in public so she just gawks without even realizing her pinky has snuck into her mouth and she's mangling it like laundry as someone inside her begins to take extensive notes about new places to bite someone, begins to speculate about whether a neck or a collarbone tastes different than an arm.
One of the hall women sneaks a peek at Cheryl, and as her hands continue searching her counterpart for whatever it is adults search for in one another, she grins a grin that makes Cheryl's teeth itch. She grins a grin that punctures flesh. She grins a grin that tastes like iron.
"Demons! Get away from my granddaughter!"
Her grandmother's piercing voice is unmistakable. At the opposite end of the bathroom hallway, she accuses with a stare and a fist and a hypertensive clench in her jaw. None of them are guilty. Cheryl would roll her eyes if she for a second wanted to disrupt her view of the action, which she doesn't. Unfortunately for her, the action disrupts itself, as the couple snickers and slinks toward the bathroom. Both of them get threateningly close as they pass by her and in her eyes they see symbols of a strange future she can only now begin to envision, in her skin they see patterns of scars yet to arrive, in her hair they smell sweat and charcoal.
She is overwhelmed by the proximity and intensity of the current moment. She coughs like a fallow engine. She pees a little. Ignorant to all this, Cheryl's grandmother grabs the hand she isn't chewing like a burnt steak and drags her away into the harsh glare of the world.